Places Between Life and Death: Secular and Ecclesiastical Perspectives on Midwifery in the Early Modern Iberian Peninsula

In 1771, Luisa Rosado, a midwife, stood before the Protomedicato, the royal board of physicians in charge of examining, licensing, and regulating the practice of medical practitioners in the Spanish Empire. Arguing for the right to produce and advertise a medicine that she claimed could be used to compel the body to expel the placenta, she was ridiculed and rejected by the physicians, which would kick off a years-long court case that ended with Rosado’s case finding the ear of King Carlos III. Centuries of secular and ecclesiastical writings about midwifery and women’s role in medicine had made themselves evident in this case, as well as the comparatively recent development of medical regulation at the state and imperial level in the Iberian Peninsula and its colonies. While England and France had required licensing in some form since at least the sixteenth century, in Spain, the Protomedicato would be ordered not to bother examining and licensing midwives in 1523, leaving it up to municipal governments to determine the correct procedure. This precedent would stay until the eighteenth century, when they would once again be put under the purview of the Protomedicato. This thesis explores the potential cultural reasons for this choice, as well as the popular image of the midwife in Spain, pulling from Inquisitorial trials, witchcraft treatises, home remedy manuals, midwifery manuals written by male physicians, and the records of Real Colegios de Cirugía, royal surgical colleges in Madrid and Barcelona, where midwives would be trained before they could be licensed after the 1750 decision to require midwives to be examined by the Protomedicato. It hopes to illuminate the important social role that these women played, as well as argue that the increase in regulation on female medical practice, as well as the broader reform of medical education, was informed by trends regarding an increase in interest regarding the centralization of public health around the Spanish crown and the Protomedicato, the governmental body that oversaw the broader regulation of medical practice throughout Spain and its empire.